GM Shutters High-Performance Vehicle Operations

The General puts the brakes on the group responsible for the Cadillac CTS-V and Chevy Cobalt SS.

General Motors has announced that it is indefinitely suspending the operations of its High-Performance Vehicle team, the group of chassis and powertrain gurus responsible for taking plebeian GM products and transforming them into tire-shredding monsters. In the hands of the HPVO team, the rental-queen Chevrolet Cobalt became the shockingly capable Cobalt SS and the refined Cadillac CTS was mutated into the burly, bad-ass CTS-V. The shutdown will not affect those vehicles, we were assured. They—and other HPVO offerings, such as the Cadillac STS- V and Chevrolet HHR SS—will complete their planned life cycles.

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Future development has been halted, however. GM is reassigning its HPVO engineers to work on core products across all of its brands, but declined to offer specific examples, saying only that “if someone is a great brake engineer, we’ll move them where they can be of the most benefit.”

What about the Camaro? And the Corvette!?

Of course the suspension of HPVO’s work means that high-performance versions of next-gen cars—a potential Chevrolet Cruze SS, for example—are shelved for now. But what about products like the Camaro SS, future Corvettes, or a potential CTS- V coupe? Take a deep breath: All are safe. (Provided, that is, GM can secure additional government loans and survive past March.)

The Camaro SS was handled by Performance Vehicle Engineering, a separate group responsible for creating performance vehicles from the ground up, the Pontiac Solstice being another example. The Corvette—including the ZR1 and Z06—has always had its own engineering team. Our inquiry about whether the unconfirmed CTS- V coupe was still possible was met simply with a coy “what do you think?” Well, we think engineering on the two-door CTS- V is very likely complete, but the question is whether actually producing such a low-volume car would be worth millions of dollars in vehicle-launch costs. The regular CTS coupe, recently revealed via GM’s viability presentation to the government, is scheduled for a 2010 launch.

We also inquired about GM Performance Parts, and were assured that it “remains a very viable part of the business,” with its own engineers staying in place.

The Move Makes Sense

As enthusiasts, we’re definitely disappointed at this turn of events, but we can’t help but agree with the move. Developing performance vehicles is expensive and time-consuming—think of all those trips to the Nürburgring!—and they never really pay off on the balance sheet. It’s true that the Cadillac V cars and Chevy’s SS models serve as brand enhancers, but GM needs to conserve whatever cash it can as well as establish long-term viability, and dropping millions on small-selling niche vehicles isn’t going to help those causes.

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Asked about the division’s eventual return, a GM spokesman says, “Never say never. But the bottom line is that we’ve got to focus on our core products, and things like crossovers, fuel-efficiency, and alternative fuels.” Indeed, in those things lay GM’s future—and any hope of profitability and a corresponding resurrection of High-Performance Vehicle Operations. Here’s hoping HPVO’s hiatus is brief.